Locus Amoenus
"Locus Amoenus" is a contemporary installation among landscape, people and pinwheels which bloomed at Euroflora 2018. Made up by three simple elements combined together in four steps tries to pair with the context of the park in Genova Nervi.
Locus Amoenus is an interactive installation consisting of three different components. The first, the Green Field, constitutes the totality of the surface on which the installation takes place, thus becoming its crucial underlying element. Nervi’s parks in their morphological and vegetational specificity constitute the reference surface that is emphasized here and left free in its singularity.
The second, the Garden of Pinwheels , consists of 1100 vertical elements white variable height, from a minimum of 60 cm to a maximum of 250 cm, arranged according to an orthogonal grid with 20x20cm mesh characterized by a multitude of pinwheels in the end higher. The intention is to recall the imaginary of the ornamental garden, in which the flowers are rendered abstract through the use of white and the stylization of the pinwheels.
The third, the Patio, is made up of a circular wooden platform emptied in the center and spaced about 45 cm from the ground, accessible to visitors and used both as a raised walkway and as a seat along the perimeter, confirming the centrality assumed by the existing turf. The circular Patio recalls the bassin element derived from the baroque tradition of green design, intended as a hub, a point of reference and meeting place for garden guests. It is precisely the water that appears at the center of the Patio constituting the physical and conceptual barycentre of the installation: the positioning of a pool inhabited by water lilies and goldfish preserves its social role as a catalyst of events and closes the conceptual circle of analogies and correspondences.
Locus Amoenus is born from the reflection made on the indispensable dialogic relationship that exists between project and context. In particular, the link with the historical park has been a stimulus for a contemporary re-reading of some components of landscape design.
More specifically, our proposal updates the topos of the English garden, subtended by the tendency to the sublime defined by an “artificially natural” nature with the locus of the wonder of the baroque garden, of wonder and bizarre: hence the intention to mutate, respectively , the lacustral theme of the reed of romantic inspiration and the seventeenth-century bassin, understood as a geometrically defined component that becomes attraction during the erring in the garden. Transversal to the two themes is the presence of water as a central and unifying element, with a nymphaeum of aquatic calla lilies.
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